


A Diminished Thing

by De_Nugis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-19
Updated: 2010-10-19
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:44:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam stays changed. Life goes on, mostly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Diminished Thing

**Author's Note:**

> I set out to write birthday fic for the delightful and excellent [](http://debbiel66.livejournal.com/profile)[ **debbiel66**](http://debbiel66.livejournal.com/) , but this turned into the kind of fic no one wants for a festive occasion, unless, to quote Buffy, you could smash in all their toes with a hammer and it would still be the bestest birthday bash in a while. Still, a happy birthday to Debbiel.  
> Title taken from Robert Frost, "The Oven Bird." "The question that he frames in all but words/Is what to make of a diminished thing."

  
When his phone rings at 3:23 AM, Dean knows who it’s going to be, and why.

“When?” is all he asks.

“Couple of hours ago,” says Sam. “You can take the time to drive. I’ve got him on ice.”

“Sammy . . . ” Dean says, and hangs up. Sam’s keeping Bobby on ice, like a side of meat in a freezer. Doing it so Dean won’t have to get on a plane. Dean’s been back and forth whenever he could get off work, but Sam hasn’t left Singer Salvage, not once, these past three terminal months. It’s the first time in the fifteen years since Lucifer that Dean’s known Sam to sleep more than a few nights running in the same bed. Or not sleep, the last weeks. Turning Bobby to stave off the bedsores, handling the bedpans, holding the cup while Bobby spat blood-streaked acidic froth. Putting Bobby’s corpse on ice before it was even cold. Sam’s good at practical.

Dean wakes Lisa up to tell her, kisses her goodbye, then gets the tarp off his girl and sets out for Sioux Falls. That much gas is a mad extravagance these days, but she’d want to be there.

“I built the pyre out back,” Sam says, by way of greeting. He looks muscular and competent and exhausted. He doesn’t touch Dean.

What’s surprising is that there are guests, guests and food. Marci brings a cobbler. Sheriff Mills moved out to California a while back, but she’s there. It’s odd, a hunter’s pyre crossed with a village funeral. Sam’s doing that eerie wooden stare, but no one seems freaked. They probably take it for grief. Then some hunter Dean’s never met gets hold of Sam’s arm, and the next Dean sees of his brother he’s laying out knives along the table in the study, gesturing while he talks up the merits of silver and bronze, more animated than he's been since Dean arrived.

  
When everyone’s gone Dean drags Sam out to sit on the hood of the Impala, surrounded by cannibalized cars and buried monsters. It’s pretty late. The sky is cloudless. The stars look close, the way they do out here. Sam doesn’t look up, but he does take the beer Dean hands him, and the second, and the third. When Dean digs out the whiskey bottle he takes his turn swigging from it.

“You never told me how Ben’s wedding went,” he says eventually.

 _You didn’t ask_ , Dean thinks.

“It was good. They both looked happy. Cake sucked, though. I know they wanted a Christmas wedding, but fruitcake? No one eats that shit.”

“I can’t believe your kid married a tax lawyer.”

 _Not my kid_ , Dean corrects in his head. He does that, now. It isn’t, God knows it’s not, that Ben doesn’t feel like his, but it's good that no one will ever be Dean’s kid. No more Winchester vessels. No more Winchester ex-vessels.

Sam’s relaxed a bit beside him, smiling that small smile, more responsive. Like a rock in the sun, something that can absorb heat and reflect it but can’t generate it.

“You could have come,” Dean blurts out. “To the wedding, I mean.”

He waits for Sam to tell him that he was busy, with that half-contemptuous note to his voice, to rattle off the list of kills that was his December, but he just wrinkles his forehead and picks at the label of the whiskey bottle.

“It was good that Bobby could make it,” he says at last, careful and appeasing. It drives Dean fucking crazy, the way Sam tries to offer Dean the people Dean loves, handing him families as substitutes for the blank space where Sam still is.

“Let’s go in. It’s getting cold,” Dean says abruptly. Sam nods and stands up and pulls Dean to his feet. Dean’s swaying a bit, not quite drunk, and the leg he'd fucked up on that last hunt has stiffened. He could use a hand, but Sam’s striding ahead, almost at the porch already.

  
Neither of them makes a move to claim Bobby’s bed. They settle into the twins in their old room. Even more than Lisa’s breathing warmth beside him, this feels like home still to some part of Dean. Dean in the bed nearest the door, Sam across the room, trying to fold his ridiculous limbs onto human-sized furniture.

“Dean?” says Sam, after a long time. Dean grunts. He’s not exactly asleep. He’s not exactly awake.

“What?”

“I have these dreams sometimes, where I don’t die.”

In the last fifteen years, Sam’s never once mentioned dreams.

“Isn’t that mostly a good thing, not dying?” Dean asks cautiously.

“Where I can’t die. Where I just go on and on, like this.”

Dean’s not drunk or sober enough to lie properly, to tell Sam that of course he’ll die. Who knows? No one is sure exactly what Sam is.

“S’what if you don’t, Sam?” he slurs instead, “Live it up. Have intergalactic sexscapades forever, like Captain Jack Harkness. I just wish I could be there to laugh at you when you turn into some giant face thing.”

“It would be better if you were there,” says Sam. He sounds completely serious, distant and desperate at the same time.

Every now and then these past years Dean’s looked out the window in Cicero and seen Sam watching the house. Not like he’s keeping guard. Like he’s warming himself at the light, or feeding off it. Sometimes he’ll ring the bell, even stay a day or two. More often he just walks away. Then Dean won’t hear from him for months, till he calls to say he’s found a werewolf with a panic room, or a vegetarian rugaru. Dean always says not to kill it. He’s never checked, after, to see if they’d been wrong. If Sam does, if he’s ever had to go back after all and finish the job, he hasn’t told Dean.

Now Dean wonders if Sam will be standing across the street from that house a hundred years after Dean’s dead. If there will still be things he doesn’t want to kill.

He hopes the silence from the other bed means Sam’s asleep.

  
Sam walks Dean out to the car the next day. Dean stands for a minute, wondering if he’ll be back here. The wrecks all look like no one’s touched them in months. The earth near the house is tumbled, dug up in raw furrows.

“You getting sloppy burying things, Sam?” he asks. That doesn’t seem like Sam. He’s nothing if not professional. Anyway, he’s not been hunting in three months.

Sam looks at him sidelong.

“I’m starting a garden, for some of the herbs I need that get hard to find,” he says. “Thought I might stay on here, part of the time. Keep the books dusted.”

“A garden, huh?” says Dean, and Sam gives him that small smile again.

“Found some interesting bones,” he says.

  
In the end Sam does die, after all. He drowns in Spokane, just short of his 49th birthday. The police recover the body and notify Dean. God knows what they make of the bites. Dean doesn’t even know what Sam was hunting, what got him. The guy who saved the world, twenty-odd years back, and he’ll go down in history as some freak muskellunge victim. Dean almost laughs, reeling with heat and whiskey beside the pyre. Then he’s down on his knees in the leaf mold, crying so hard it’s like being kicked in the ribs.

Sammy wanted to be mortal. Dean’s glad that fucking God let him have that, at least.

He gets back into Cicero late. Lisa’s sleeping. Dean doesn’t wake her, not yet. He stands at the window, watching the empty sidewalk across the street, no Sam staring back at him through the bars of the cage.


End file.
